1. Field of the Invention
The invention concerns a method and a system for saving the local clock of a data processing area or zone, configured on a multicellular platform of data processing resources.
2. Description of the Related Background
At the present moment, one of the axes of development of data processing equipment and/or systems concerns the implementation of a maximum flexibility of configurable data processing resources, for the benefit of a user having available, locally, significantly reduced data processing resources.
In the present configurable or reconfigurable data processing systems, as illustrated in FIG. 1a, a multicellular platform PF of data processing resources is used which can be configured from a management tool MT, by a user, so as to constitute a data processing area Pi formed by a given number of cells, each cell Ckj comprising at least one central processing unit, working memories, and a local physical component capable of delivering a local clock signal. Each data processing area is managed by a specific multiprocessor operating system and may consequently be configured by the user with a view to executing an operating activity. In general, an operating activity corresponds to an application requiring a specific computing power according to the type and volume of data processed by this application.
More particularly, it should be remembered that the management tool may advantageously be constituted by a micro-computer connected in a local network, extended to the multicellular platform.
Finally, common resources, such as peripheral elements, mass memory, of the system disk type, may be associated with the cellular platform.
Such systems correspond to systems or machines, customarily designated as partition machines, and normally make it possible to install and execute different operating activities in the different partitions of the platform. Nevertheless, when such an installation is carried out, it is not generally possible to transfer an installation into another partition without reinstallation or physical manipulation while additionally preserving the context of execution of the aforesaid operating activity.
With regard to the existing mechanisms, permitting the dynamic repetition of operating activities of one data processing system by another data processing system, equipped with the same operating system, such mechanisms essentially utilise two systems which must imperatively synchronise their context of execution and which share only their data disks and not their system disk.
Finally, the static mechanisms for operating activity repetition require either the reinstallation of an equivalent system or, if required, the physical transfer from system disk to an equivalent system, or even the recabling of the accesses to the disk of the system replaced to an equivalent replacement system.